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36 BizEd MARCH | APRIL 2015 Each class is relatively small, with 2014's entering class of 21 being the largest yet. Undergraduates start taking MBA courses in their senior years while completing their STEM courses, occasionally taking courses that apply to both degrees. For instance, industrial engineering undergraduates must do a senior project that often involves acting as consultants for a manufacturer, which fits within the MBA program. Students are placed in diverse four- or five-person teams that they stick with for ten core courses. Admission to the program is fiercely competitive and students know there's a lot of work ahead, says Ronald Ackerman, director of graduate admissions and student services. "They're taking 18 to 21 credit hours of MBA programming as well as 400-level engineering courses, so they're hard-working, focused, and ma- ture. They're the best and the brightest." PREPPING PROFESSIONALS The Krannert School of Management at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, has a strong STEM focus in most of its majors, as well as a tech commercialization stream with- in its two-year MBA. Therefore, an MBA geared to STEM profession- als seemed like a natural fit, and the school launched a one-year program in June 2014. Among the first group of 20 students, the average level of work experience is five years. At Purdue, the semester is broken into two modules, and students supplement their core courses with electives from the colleges of science, engineering, and technology. During the spring semester, they add an experiential learning compo- nent that involves either doing a project with a tech-based company or participat- ing in the tech commercialization stream where they can work with researchers on campus or startups in the research park. Students also can opt to take a series of Lean Launchpad courses, which are usually filled with a mix of MBAs and engineering students. MAKING THE CONNECTION Temple University's Fox School of Business in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, offers three STEM programs. The bach- elor of business administration in man- agement information systems (MIS) enrolls about 350 students each year, the BBA in actuarial science enrolls about 300, and the master of science in infor- mation technology auditing and cyber- security (MS ITACS) enrolls about 50. The second two programs have always been classified as STEM under federal standards, but the BBA in MIS, launched in 2000, was reclassified in 2013. The benefits were immediate. One hundred percent of the graduates have been placed, and a Fortune 10 firm has made a multiyear commitment to provide funding for and recruit from the program. Now the school is making a concerted effort to remind financial aid administrators, corpo- rate partners, students, and alumni about its STEM programs. For example, because these programs originate in the business school, financial aid professionals often do not suggest STEM scholarships for the students enrolled in them. To make students aware of STEM-based scholar- ships outside Temple University, the Fox School created a website at community. mis.temple.edu/stem-scholarships- and-awards/. The school also explains visa benefits to international students interested in its MS ITACS program. RAISING AWARENESS Students at Arizona State Universi- ty's W.P. Carey School of Business in Tempe can choose to pursue one of four STEM-related degrees, including bachelor of science degrees in computer information systems or business data analytics and master of science degrees in information management or business analytics. The newest is the bachelor's in business data analytics, which just launched in fall 2014 with 92 students. To have these four programs classi- fied as STEM with the U.S. Department of Education, the faculty had to demon- strate how the program contributed to the Arizona Higher Education Enter- prise Plan, which emphasizes the need for graduates in high-demand fields. According to Michael Goul, department chair and professor of information systems at the Carey School, "The Board of Regents has created an online dash- board that details the degrees awarded in the state in high-demand fields in order to raise awareness and increase transparency of overall progress in the state of Arizona." Many of the students in the program are double majoring in business data an- alytics and disciplines such as econom- ics, finance, marketing, and computer information systems. Goul notes that accounting students also are increasingly expressing interest in the program as more accoun- tants are required to work with unstructured data. 'MASTERING THE WAVE' The next step for business schools is to make more students aware of the many opportunities available, attracting them to business training and retaining them in STEM fields, says Goul. "We want to help them master the emerging big data wave that is rushing ashore for virtually all business disciplines." Whenever anyone asks Moore of EM LYON why scientific types—or anyone else, for that matter—should study entre- preneurship, he says, "It's about develop- ing capacity. We can't predict the future, but we can help our graduates create their own. Who knows what roads grad- uates will take? But business schools can do our part in helping them make more effective contributions to society." And for Moore, Goul, and many other business educators, that means designing programs that will make business students experts at applying management expertise to technical innovations.